Bodies and controls: civil regulation forms: of discourses and practices in Medellin 1948-1952

Abstract

This study of the city of Medellin in the period 1948-1952, attempts to outline a history of the civil body. Its inquiry is mainly conducted based on historical documents, which let visualize an ideal of a city and of its material citizen. These ideals oriented some regulatory and controlling devices over the territoriality of the citizen, of the city itself, and of the urban expressions. In this panorama, Medellin’s Public Improvement Society emerges as a constructing agent of one of the expressive forms of the civil body or civilizing ideal. Likewise, both the expression of the identifying illusion of the city of Medellin in the 1950s and the 9-of-April historical event account for the urban violence as a dimension in the cultural process of the making of the civil body.